12-year-old Madison Baxter has been playing football since second grade. She played on her football team in sixth grade. But this year she was told not to come to tryout for the seventh-grade team because she is provoking “impure thoughts.” Baxter’s mother says this was the explanation offered by Patrick Stuart an administrator at the Strong Rock Christian Academy private school Madison attends. Cassy Blythe, Madison’s mother, told Atlanta’s WXIA-TV,

“In the meeting with the CEO of the school [Patrick Stuart], I was told that the reasons behind it were one, that the boys were going to start lusting after her and have impure thoughts about her and that the locker-room talk was not appropriate for a female to hear even ...

12-year-old Madison Baxter has been playing football since second grade. She played on her football team in sixth grade. But this year she was told not to come to tryout for the seventh-grade team because ...

Ed. note: This is a guest post from Mychal Denzel Smith. He is a writer, social commentator, and mental health advocate whose work on politics, social justice, mental health, and black male identity has appeared in outlets such as The Nation, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Gawker, Salon, The Root, and more.

It seems simple enough: If you participate in the cover up of a rape, especially one that involves minors, you should lose your job. If your job requires you to be responsible for teenagers, then two of those teenagers rape an intoxicated 16-year-old and share photos of the act through social media, and your response is to joke about it with them, it’s not that hard to decide ...

Ed. note: This is a guest post from Mychal Denzel Smith. He is a writer, social commentator, and mental health advocate whose work on politics, social justice, mental health, and black male identity has appeared in ...

On Friday, BuzzFeed posted a soft-core porn display of University of Kansas football basketball fans Tweeting pictures of their cleavage “to support their college team.” Apparently #KUboobs, as its called, has been going on for some time, and the trend has spread to other schools. Yet, given my lack of expertise in both college sports and searching for breasts on the Internet, I’m new to the story.

If we forget about the athletic context for a second, the pictures strike me as a non-event (except for all the news sites that get to put the word “boobs” in a headline and see the page hits roll in). I’m never, ever going to tell women to put on more clothing ...

On Friday, BuzzFeed posted a soft-core porn display of University of Kansas football basketball fans Tweeting pictures of their cleavage “to support their college team.” Apparently #KUboobs, as its called, has been going on for ...

Less than a day into the Manti Te’o revelations, we’ve heard more about a fake dead girlfriend of a Notre Dame football player than a real dead girl. Lizzy Seeberg committed suicide, not long after being intimidated by Notre Dame football players for reporting a sexual assault by one of their teammates. A second woman who was taken to the hospital for a rape exam declined to formally accuse another Notre Dame football player after getting a ...

Granted, this is truly a weird and almost addictively fascinating story. But let’s not forget that while the media buzzes and the university responds, the Notre Dame football program has pretty much ignored an ...

So there was a big football game yesterday. And while I boycotted it, apparently ESPN announcers Kirk Herbstreit and Brent Musburger had some time between plays to devote to ogling the Alabama quarterback’s girlfriend. Some real classy stuff:

“When you’re a quarterback at Alabama, you see that lovely lady there? She does go to Auburn, I’ll admit that, but she’s also Miss Alabama, and that’s A.J. McCarron’s girlfriend. Wow, I’m telling ya, you quarterbacks, you get all the good looking women. What a beautiful woman! Whoa! So if you’re a youngster in Alabama, start getting the football out and throw it around the backyard with pops.”

This is some pretty standard objectification. So common–especially in the sports world–it’s almost not worth ...

So there was a big football game yesterday. And while I boycotted it, apparently ESPN announcers Kirk Herbstreit and Brent Musburger had some time between plays to devote to ogling the Alabama quarterback’s girlfriend. Some real ...

Tonight, the University of Notre Dame’s football team will play Alabama’s in Miami. I don’t know anything about sports (other than girls’ high school cross country, it’s a vicious world) but I get why a clash between the two top ranked college programs in the country would be a big deal. But I’m still confused why we care more about the game than the many women who found rape and administrative cover-up at Notre Dame.

Dave Zirin has a strong piece at The Nation on why the response to Penn State and Notre Dame’s cruel responses to sexual violence on campus have been so different. He writes:

As unbeaten Notre Dame prepares to play in tonight’s national championship game against ...

Tonight, the University of Notre Dame’s football team will play Alabama’s in Miami. I don’t know anything about sports (other than girls’ high school cross country, it’s a vicious world) but I get why a clash between ...

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